A Time Capsule Built of Email Clutter
This weekend I logged into one of my email accounts that’s long dormant, with the goal of cleaning up my inbox. As a disclaimer, I admit to being a bit of an email hoarder. I had opened this account back in the mid-2000s, and gave myself an email name that, while was fun, ultimately would not be ideal for sending out resumes and less casual correspondences.
A few years later I’d open yet another email account, which had a more professional name, and became my main one for years. Meanwhile, my account with the fun name slowly faded away from my consciousness until recently, when I decided to give it a second life.
When I opened my account to begin scrubbing, I saw the total message count and knew I had some work to do. Over 16,000 messages were sitting in my inbox. Most of the messages I began deleting were newsletters from retailers I ordered from and organizations I had donated to at one point. There was also obligatory spam that bypassed filters and landed into my inbox. However, among the messages included correspondences with prior coworkers who’d eventually fade away, and one from a former guild member whom I played World of Warcraft with. Of course, I had to read those, and I was surprised with some of the things in my life at those times I had forgotten, as well as how short my emails were. These days I’ll write a novel to people over email. Back then my correspondences had just enough detail to color in the points I tried to make.
I never considered email clutter to be a time capsule, and somehow nostalgic. Email, even with personal correspondences and despite how immediate it is, always felt non-personal and cold compared to a written letter, or phone call to me. Going through my email scrubbing, I realized that perhaps some emails, after you go through all the newsletters, offers, and spam, have some heart to them after all.
